Monitoring Disk Usage With Iotop

“If you want to keep an eye on the CPU usage of your processes,
you can use top. For disk I/O, the Python program iotop does the
same thing, which can be extremely useful if you’re experiencing
hard disk thrashing.

“iotop is available as a package for Debian and Ubuntu, and it
should work out-of-the-box if you’re running a standard kernel. If
you’re installing from source, you’ll need Python 2.5 or later and
a 2.6.20 or later kernel with the TASK_DELAY_ACCT and
TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING options enabled”

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